Posted on 04/16/2019 6:43:07 AM PDT by Heartlander
A few months ago, I was privileged to attend a conference on intelligent design. Sponsored by the Discovery Institute and conveniently held in Dallas, it was too good to miss. That said, my beagle twins don’t appreciate it when I spend less than 22 hours per day with them. So I got my girlfriend to hound-sit. (She said that they looked forlorn. …)
And at this friendly event at a gorgeous Baptist church full of friendly people in Highland Park, I had a disturbing religious epiphany. One that has haunted me ever since. And led me to question myself in deeply uncomfortable ways. But before I tell about that, I need to describe the conference.
There were many top-notch talks. One was by the always delightful Eric Metaxas on the shallowness of lazy secularism in academic culture. Another talk came from pioneering nano-technology inventor and biologist James Tour. He exposed the utter ignorance and bafflement that Darwinian theory generates concerning the origins of life.
Natural selection and random mutation cannot begin to account for development of the cell, for instance. The extraordinary complexity and fine-tuned perfection of the most basic organic structures of even primitive life forms…. It baffles mathematicians and computer scientists. Some of them have noted that the odds of even one beneficial mutation (much less hundreds of millions, which Darwinist theory would need) occurring in all the time since the earth cooled are infinitesimal. Like the odds of Mt. Rushmore being a natural formation. Intrigued, I ran out and got one book which Tour recommended, Darwin Devolves, by Michael Behe. I’m reading it now, and promise a report on it when I’m finished.
I’ve already written here about one of the talks by Stephen C. Meyer. It gave the basic thesis of his book, Darwin’s Doubt. (I ran out and read it. You should too.) Meyer noted that in the 150-plus years since The Origin of Species appeared, scientists have scoured the world in vain seeking the
intermediate species which would have borne out Darwin’s theory. … Darwin worried about this, especially about the vast geological period called the Cambrian. In it, we find the sudden appearance of more than dozen whole new types of animals, as different from each other as shrimps are from squid, as cockroaches are from earthworms. They all seemed to crop up at once, and in Darwin’s day there wasn’t a trace of any ancestors who bore out his idea of slow, gradual changes from one common ancestor. Darwin put his faith in the ongoing search for fossils, admitting that if they weren’t found they posed a grave threat to his theory.
We still haven’t found them. What we have found, however, is how genetics work. We’ve learned how exquisitely complicated the simplest protein is. (It seems … designed, just like the eye, the wing, and the brain.) And we’ve invented computer science. We’ve seen that the code we write to run our computers is quite analogous to the code of DNA. And as Meyer explains in his rich, well-argued book, it was computer scientists who first raised the serious question: Is it really possible that random changes in DNA code would generate new structures and species? Because that never, never, never happens with computer code.
Meyer gave another talk, equally thought-provoking. In fact, it was this lecture that sparked my squirm in the chair epiphany. The title came from that of his new book, The Return of the God Hypothesis. Below see him Meyer unpacking his thesis in conversation with Michael Medved:
Meyer explained that scientists once gladly assumed that the universe had both a beginning and a Beginner. As a student of the philosophy of science at Cambridge University, Meyer learned that the theism embraced by Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler and Newton had gradually faded. As fields of science advanced, and we began to understand more aspects of the universe, leading thinkers began to decide that they could do without the “God hypothesis.”
At moments like these, my little Darwin emerges and whispers reassuringly: “Maybe it’s all nonsense. Maybe we just get born and then … just die. Endless, dreamless sleep, where nothing matters and you have nothing to fear.”
This trend became almost a consensus by the end of the nineteenth century. That was when physicists, for instance, felt confident that they’d explained away virtually every cosmic conundrum. You can find old textbooks from the period, in fact, which half-smugly, half-mournfully stated that physics as a field was almost finished. Virtually everything had already been understood. (In 1890.) Just a few minor questions remained. But we wouldn’t need God to answer them. The universe had always existed. It was very old, and very large. But our telescopes had penetrated most of it. And soon our thinkers would account for the last few anomalies.
Of course, this proved wildly wrong. Uncounted galaxies exist that these Victorian materialists never dreamed of. Neither space nor time are absolute, but relative to each other. Space is not static and flat but dynamic and curved. Most importantly, the universe was neither static nor eternal. It had a beginning, the Big Bang, which suggested a Beginner. And eventually, an end.
Meyer told the story of how Einstein, as a good secular scientist, fiercely resisted this conclusion — though a Catholic priest had already theorized the Big Bang and astronomer Edwin Hubble had stumbled over evidence of it. After accepting the Big Bang, the honest Einstein began to talk about God, and would throughout his life. In fact, the more we learn about the universe, the less plausible we find the comfy scientific materialism that satisfied Victorians like … Charles Darwin.
At some point during this talk, I felt a gear turn in my head. Then a shudder went through the whole Rube Goldberg, sending all the mismatched parts of my mind into frantic motion.
What if God is real? Not real as in “something we hope for, and have decided to be confident about, thanks to Pascal’s Bet.” Or as in “a friend whom we trust to go on being a friend.” Or “the best explanation for a series of mysteries, including certain apparent religious experiences.” Or even “an argument whose truth we feel certain of.”
No. Real as the light by which you’re reading this. As certain as the smash of a plate you drop on the floor. Reliable not as in “socialism reliably produces poverty and shortages” but as in “if you stick your hand in a fire, it will hurt.” Inexorable and majestic, impossible to escape. Not the wisp of hope you feel for a happy outcome when your airplane hits some turbulence, but the vertigo which you feel looking down on the Grand Canyon, which seems somehow to be sucking you in.
That’s a horse of a different feather. What would it mean if the God of the Bible were real to us in that sense? If the Fact of God’s existence were as ludicrous to deny as the existence of air or water? As suicidal to flout as a hundred federal agents pointing rifles at your windows?
Suddenly I could feel a twinge of sympathy for Darwin and his devotees. I realized that in moments of crisis, I’d been relying on them for comfort. A little part of my mind, which soaked in the secular Zeitgeist, hides behind a curtain. It doesn’t come out much. It doesn’t need to. But at certain moments, it pops out its head:
At moments like these, my little Darwin emerges and whispers reassuringly: “Maybe it’s all nonsense. Maybe we just get born and then … just die. Endless, dreamless sleep, where nothing matters and you have nothing to fear.”
Maybe those people who resist the evidence of their senses and their reason, and cling to scientific materialism with the fervor of religious faith just don’t bother with the curtain. They keep their Darwin on the sofa, and chat with him all through the day. What a friend they have in Darwin, what blessed assurance of endless rest. … And when they attack, try to silence, fire, or persecute people like Stephen Meyer or Michael Behe, they’re really just defending themselves from a Truth of which they’re terrified. Well, the fear of God is said to be the beginning of wisdom. Though probably not in this sense.
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Humans are the only species that evolved with a neurological capacity for mystical thought. Mysticism is at the core of wonderment. As long as humans continue ask “how” and “why”, arrive at their own conclusions without coercion or retribution, however right or wrong, progress and civilization will continue.
Darwin was a great thinker and had significant insights. He himself , like Copernicus, Tycho Brache and Galileo did not deny the existence of God. His work however was commandeered by the atheists who were a growing branch of the Enlightenment and very heavily concentrated in academic settings.
Every Christian who has met Jesus in a real and personal way knows without a moment’s hesitation that God is absolutely, positively real.
Atheists and non-Christians have set up this false narrative that if something can be explained by science it is somehow proof that God does not exist.
Rather, many things in science are clear manifestations of the creator/God through which mysteries have been revealed such as genetics and the ecosphere.
How is it, for example, that almost everything condenses in cold and yet water expands and necessarily expands to protect the wildlife in lakes and ponds?
God provides an ecosystem where some life turns oxygen into CO2 and others turn CO2 into oxygen. Most of the earth is covered by water which rises into the atmosphere as steam when heated but, when it is sufficiently cooled in the atmosphere, it falls again as rain or snow and eventually finds its way back to streams, lakes and oceans - it is our planet's temperature regulation system to sustain life.
Paul said that if nobody were to tell a man about God, nature itself would testify of Him so that no man is innocent.
Darwin has been used. The evolutionary theory is just a small sample of his work yet it is deemed to be correct in order to deny God.
Why are his writings concerning certain races of people to be savage or sub-human not ever mentioned?
20 million years seems like a long time, and it is if that's how long you have to work and pay taxes. :) But since the Darwinists were expecting the archaeological record to show that life evolved across maybe 5 billion years, seeing most of it spring up in 20 million years is rather sudden.
Basically it shows the math of natural selection was off by a factor of about 25. In any other scientific discipline if your experiments showed your math was off by 2 or 3 or 4 it causes you to rethink your hypothesis. Not with Darwinists. They're #1 experiment (a century and a half of archaeology) was off by a factor of 25 and they still cling to their theory?
Why? Cuz to them it's not a theory. It's a religion.
Thanks. An excellent article.
It put me in mind of a guy in the headlines a few days ago who was asking, “What if everything is just a computer projection?” My thought at the time was, that’s a very shallow way of agreeing that everything was created from the mind of God.
"however right or wrong," ???
'Philosophers' and pundits might be able to get away with "however right or wrong," for a while.
Engineers, airplane pilots, etc? Naaa.... "however right or wrong," will catch up with your very quickly!
BTW, eternal life in Christ begins the moment you decide to CHOOSE His way, not your own. You do not have to wait until you die to begin.
". . . But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned" (1Co 2:14 AV).
When an honest scientist through experimentation and study comes to understand that a cherished hypothesis is wrong, science and civilization advances. True in all fields be it architecture, aeronautics, medicine etc. A truly honest and educated man learns from “mistakes”.
Charles Darwin became fairly adamant about the lack of divine plan in the workings of nature. He would say, “There seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings and in the action of natural selection, than in the course which the wind blows.” He would be so bold as to write, “gradually [I] came to disbelieve in Christianity as a divine revelation,” and that he could “hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true . . . this is a damnable doctrine.”Darwin wrote, “My theology is a simple muddle; I cannot look at the universe as the result of blind chance, yet I can see no evidence of beneficent design, or indeed of design of any kind, in the details.” A year earlier, he wrote to Asa Gray,
“There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent & omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidæ with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice. Not believing this, I see no necessity in the belief that the eye was expressly designed… I am inclined to look at everything as resulting from designed laws, with the details, whether good or bad, left to the working out of what we may call chance.”
- Shadow of Oz
He was not a spiritual man, nor are any of those who merely believe in "intelligent (intellectual) design" which is also yet another invention of a "natural" mind, a process incapable of conveying the deep things of the Spirit of God to the human heart.
One answer to “the Cambrian Explosion”: Mount St. Helen’s . . .
You are confusing his theological musings with his well documented wonder about the complexity of nature and the potential existence of God. He did not in most of his writings definitively deny the existence of God and spent considerable time correcting the notion that his free thinking grandfather was an atheist. He was not a classical Christian and like many people of the Enlightenment could be defined as an agnostic. an agnostic is not an atheist.
is time real or just the way we measure changes?
Like the spread of an illness throughout your body.
Do we measure it in time because it’s what we know or is it just a series of events unfolding?
I assume there is such a thing as time :)
This CHOOSING is the single, knife-edge turning point of a human heart exercising the "agape" principle, which can be fully defined as:
Where in this case Jesus is The One.
The bulk of the Professoeiat seems to believe that Mankind is God and that the Liberal Intelligentsia is God’s Brain.
As I sit here trying to use reasoning and critical thinking, it suddenly dawns on me that there was a time when “I” was more than “dead”. In fact, “I” never existed. Free floating particles scattered throughout the nothingness somehow all came together in the vastness of space in one location at a point in time to become the conception of my earthly body’s beginning; sperm met egg. The soul spark of life provided, the unfolding blueprint meticulously followed, and then, roughly, nine months later, a fully formed human baby… eyes, brain, organs… all functioning and miraculous to behold arrives.
Darwin, like so many students who fail to narrow their topic for a term paper, came in to the game way too late looking for one tiny needle in a trillion plus haystacks.
Existence happens to all forms of animals, but not all of these animals to my knowledge have any capability whatsoever to contemplate the workings of everything in the knowable universe. Only we humans seem to possess that ability to the nth degree. Why? What is the point?
I can’t imagine that existence is simply existing without something to do in the meantime, but it’s really boring is the answer. Something, or more likely some sentient being caused us to come into existence from a state of being “more than dead” to a state of being fully assembled and functional, having the ability to observe and learn… to reason… to witness the grandeur of the entire spectacle! Again, I ask: Why? What is the point?
If we are merely here for the blink of an eye versus eternity to witness the grandeur of it all, doesn’t it also make some kind of sense that there’s a reason for our witnessing it? Otherwise, there would be no reason for the grandeur of it all to exist, yet there it is just sitting there in all of its glorious, grandiose splendor waiting to be experienced.
As for me, I’ll continue to believe that when my earthly body dies and it returns to the state of being dead once again, my soul that was provided to me to animate the vessel of flesh that I occupied will move on to rejoin Him, the one who placed the soul spark in the first place.
Darwin and now, Darwinists consistently step all around the obvious answer to all of their conundrums. They just can’t seem to bring themselves to say it without some tangible form of evidence. The evidence is all around them waiting to be experienced, but only for the blink of an eye versus eternity!
There are none so blind as those that will not see.
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